MAZER

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 12:12 am

What are your thoughts on this game? 1.. 2... 3... GO!

Trev · Post by **Trev** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 7:05 am

I thought it was a good move on ALG's part to switch from their bread & butter shooters, which were starting to become stale.

Mazer is a tough one for me to comment on ... I really haven't played it all that much when compared to many other 3DO games (which I guess means I don't like it particually well) I remember thinking that the game was overly cheap, especially in the later levels. I also recall wishing that the play field was bigger, as the levels seemed a bit small and cramped.

T2KFreeker · Post by **T2KFreeker** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 8:31 am

Robotronish. As cool as the game can be, I feel the same thing as Trev already said. Not the worst 3DO game, but nowhere near the best. I like it better than I did "Space Pirates".

sneth · Post by **sneth** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 8:33 am

i never really sat down and played this game. The style looks like it could have been fun, but i imagine it fell short on many fronts.

ALG was not really one of my favorite developers, so i cant imagine great things here.

FrumpleOrz · Post by **FrumpleOrz** » Sun Jan 01, 2012 9:43 pm

I have a love-hate relationship with Mazer. It's by all means an absolutely terrible game. It looks bad. It controls poorly. It doesn't really seem like they even bothered to try. When the pictures of each character is simply the same dude in different outfits, it raises a few flags, you know? The tiny maps, the awful animation, terrible character models, there's really nothing redeeming about it. I do enjoy playing it however.

It's more of a nostalgia thing for me though. It was a game my best friend in junior high and I played a lot one afternoon. It was just the right game at the right time and it was like a week before he moved away, so yeah. I'd never recommend anyone else to purchase the game though, nor will I ask anyone else to ever play it with me, simply because it could taint the enjoyment I had of it 12 years ago.

T2KFreeker · Post by **T2KFreeker** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 9:24 am

FrumpleOrz wrote:I have a love-hate relationship with Mazer. It's by all means an absolutely terrible game. It looks bad. It controls poorly. It doesn't really seem like they even bothered to try. When the pictures of each character is simply the same dude in different outfits, it raises a few flags, you know? The tiny maps, the awful animation, terrible character models, there's really nothing redeeming about it. I do enjoy playing it however.

It's more of a nostalgia thing for me though. It was a game my best friend in junior high and I played a lot one afternoon. It was just the right game at the right time and it was like a week before he moved away, so yeah. I'd never recommend anyone else to purchase the game though, nor will I ask anyone else to ever play it with me, simply because it could taint the enjoyment I had of it 12 years ago.

Wow, you basically put into words how I feel about Virtuoso!

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Mon Jan 02, 2012 7:35 pm

Here's the thing.. I picked this one up this past week, with the intention of giving it a serious effort. I "tried" the game last year (during one drunken stupor, most-likely) and it seemed fun. I liked the cheesy visual style, and I really like the quick end of level cutscenes. All of it gives it a very Midway-developed, mid-1990s arcade-like feel.

Here's the problem though: Now that I am trying to really play it, I am seeing all of its problems. Bad, bad problems that make the game damn-near impossible to succeed at (meaning, it's not worth playing at all).

First off, someone mentioned, the controls can be unresponsive. Not to the point where I can't control my character properly or play the game, but the problem is definitely there.

The biggest problem I have is not being able to strafe. This seems to be a necessary function in the game, and the manual says to simply hold down "A" to do it. What happens when I hold down A? Well, nothing. The character holds out his gun like he looks like he will start shooting in one direction while I try to move in another, but he doesn't and he simply runs the other way. I have been able to get the strafe function to work if I rapidly mash A, then hold it, but that only works 25% of the time, heh.

The other big problem is that the bosses are unfair. How are you supposed to kill these guys without losing a life (or three)? Often they run much faster than you, requiring you to dash in order to get out of the way. But of course, your Turbo/dash ability is limited, so when you run out (which you will, quickly), you are toast. The first boss isn't so bad and I found I can run away, then dash in with a close attack (which will knock him down and deal a lot of damage), rinse and repeat, but I can't do the same thing on other bosses because I run out of Turbo while they are chasing me.

So, yeah. Those are my thoughts on it right now. I really want to like it, but I just can't figure out a way to progress in a controllable manner due to the issues above.

goldenband · Post by **goldenband** » Sat Sep 01, 2012 9:58 pm

Ha, it's pretty funny that Austin was the last person to post in this thread. (Austin, I'll let you decide whether to reveal why...

)

Anyway, I just got Mazer on Friday, put it in for testing this morning, and ended up playing through the end (which took about three hours). It's so utterly a product of its time, from the rockin' music, to the hilariously cheesy character design, to the unnecessary zooming/scaling, to the buggy controls and hit detection.

And those last two things are a problem -- in so many cases I was shooting right at a boss, but because I wasn't lined up perfectly my shots didn't connect. Or I'd be turning to face a boss, and for some reason my character would stop 45 degrees away from where I wanted him to be; that got aggravating fast.

That said, the fact that I played through to the end says something about Mazer...and what it says is "this game has unlimited continues."

But actually, that's one of the game's saving graces; it allows you to figure out a strategy for each stage, and keeps the frustration factor from getting too high.

I actually found most of the game to be pretty easy -- I was able to play through the first 12 levels within 75-90 minutes at the most. The key to a lot of the game is using your shield offensively, together with turbo; that allows you to plow through groups of enemies more easily than if you try to pick them off individually.

Some boss fights were a little tricky, but I was often able to either (a) find a sweet spot where incoming attacks were few to none, or (b) figure out a way to get the boss stuck on one of the corners in the stage and blast him into smitheerens.

That said, the third-to-last boss -- Inferno II, IIRC -- is brutal, and I spent about half my gametime on that level alone. He's fast as hell, incredibly powerful, and the stage offers no real protection (he won't go across the lava patches you open up, but that only lasts for a couple seconds). Your only hope is to get in close and unleash a combination of special attacks and melee attacks, and between that and toggling your shield, hope to keep him from triggering his buzzsaw attack. I had to stockpile an extra life or two, button-mash like hell, and have some great luck in order to finally take him out.

(BTW I didn't realize I had a special attack, i.e. what you get by pressing A+C, until this level!)

The last two bosses were much easier, though the final boss required some trickery: I got his first form caught on the scenery, and then swamped his second form with turbo + melee attacks.

All things considered, Mazer is kind of like playing Robotron as interpreted by the cast of Shadow: War of Succession. It's total cheese, right down to the "we digitized our intern" cast of characters. (The credits list four different people, but I find that hard to believe -- sure looks like it's all the same guy to me. Either way, I used Hawk for the whole thing.)

So yes, it's a bad game, but it's an entertaining and challenging bad game that never got overly frustrating despite its major, unequivocal flaws. It was fun to play through it (though to be sure it required an indulgent attitude), and likely would have been even more fun with two players. If the controls were a bit better, it could've been a trash classic; as it stands, it doesn't reach that level, but it's still worth a playthrough for those who appreciate early 1990s cheese done arcade-style.

BTW I managed to trigger at least one hilarious bug. When you're jumping in the air, if you hit a certain combination of buttons at the right time (I think Turbo is one of them), then your character will touch the ground and stay at his zoomed-in size. He was bigger than the boss -- it was as if Paul Bunyan had suddenly ventured into a video game!

FUJISAN · Post by **FUJISAN** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 6:42 am

In a mail order site of Japan, this "MAZER" is sold for 2,300 yen (Approximately 31 dollars),
will i be worth buying it? ?(no box,manual only)

Can I enjoy it even if i cannot understand English?

Is interested,; but...

Post by **3DOKid** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 11:16 am

Didn't a lot of people at the time send this back in disgust?

FUJISAN · Post by **FUJISAN** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 1:55 pm

3DOKid wrote:Didn't a lot of people at the time send this back in disgust?

It was able to be understood somehow.

Post by **3DOKid** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 3:17 pm

I think the game game i would most liked to have returned was VR Stalker.

goldenband · Post by **goldenband** » Tue Sep 04, 2012 7:49 pm

FUJISAN wrote:In a mail order site of Japan, this "MAZER" is sold for 2,300 yen (Approximately 31 dollars),
will i be worth buying it? ?(no box,manual only)

That sounds expensive to me, but my copy was $10, so maybe I'm biased.

FUJISAN wrote:Can I enjoy it even if i cannot understand English?

You definitely won't need much English. The items are labeled with their names, but you can probably memorize that. The names of the levels are also in English. Otherwise there's almost no English.

As for whether you will enjoy it, I would say: it's basically 糞ゲー, but I still had fun.

FUJISAN · Post by **FUJISAN** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 4:09 am

>goldenband

The word 「糞ゲー」 was a universal language!!!

Post by **3DOKid** » Wed Sep 05, 2012 12:48 pm

「糞ゲー」indeed.

Austin · Post by **Austin** » Thu Sep 06, 2012 6:18 pm

Had this game had a smoother framerate and much more responsive controls, I think it would actually be pretty enjoyable. I don't mind the crap digitized visuals--it reeks of a US-based arcade developer, and I'm someone partial to that style (i.e., games like Mortal Kombat, Primal Rage, etc.), and I also dig the end of stage animations (those are actually pretty cool and well done). But those two issues I named, especially the controls, break the game. I can't even get my characters to strafe and fire on a consistent basis. More often than not, it just doesn't want to work, and when it does, it's usually a situation of "Well why didn't it do it when ENEMIES were on the screen??". Doing something that simple shouldn't require so much trial and error.

goldenband · Post by **goldenband** » Thu Sep 06, 2012 11:19 pm

Heh, in my run through the game, I think I basically didn't strafe at all! Maybe that assumption, so to speak, helped me enjoy it more.